Catholicism; Roman and Anglican (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: individual as in the presence of the universal and in relation to the imperishable; and it does this not that it may despise time and the individual, but that it may magnify both; not that it may enfeeble, but that it may enlarge and strengthen duty; not that it may weaken the worth of character or make light of human need, but that it may lend a mightier import to the one, and give a vaster reach to the other. The men who live as for eternity, believing that the problem of their being is, in harmony with the will of their Creator, to work out the ultimate order and good of the universe, live under the noblest and humanest inspiration possible to man. And this is the inspiration given by religion; to have it is to breathe the thoughtful breath that comes of a living faith. But this idea of religion requires, as a clear necessity, that the polity which seeks to articulate and incorporate and realize it be a polity that allows the religious society to live under the inspiration of its own ideals, under the control of its own truths, obedient to its own laws, altogether as a society whose energies and ends are all religious and all of God. IV. The Ideal of Religion Embodied in Jesus Christ But so far the discussion has been almost purely deductive; and so it may be as well to confirm and illustrate the conclusion from the inductive or historical side. To discuss the abstract idea of religion isa small thing; it is a greater to look at it as embodied and expressed in the supreme religious personality of the race. In Jesus Christ what we term the ideal was realized, perfect religion became a living and articulate reality. Through His only- begotten Son, God declared what He meant and what He means man to be. I. We must interpret Christ's idea of religion through His life. ...